[TickMark]

I thought I wouldn't live to see the day for Clojure related link to be the top link on HN. I had to reload 5 times.

Clojure's cool, I am glad I got to work with it professionally. I did go back to Javascript, but it made me a better developer. It strikes a nice balance between being a pure functional language and being practical.

[htfu]

Hmm, feels to me like there's something Clojure related on the front page every other day. Transient enough though.

[hombre_fatal]

5-8 years ago, Clojure was constantly on HN! Then it fell out of HN attention.

[dominotw]

Yes not sure what happened to clojure. The rise and fall of clojure is really intriguing.

Looks like everyone just went back to java.

[snapey]

It hasn't fallen. The Clojure community has been growing steadily and continues to grow (it's a great community, I'll add). Things have just settled down since, that's why there are fewer announcement.

As an aside, the 2019 SO survey shows Clojure programmers are the best paid [1].

Most Clojure programmers I know (myself included) would not choose to go back to Java.

[1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-...

[dustingetz]

John deGoes said "Clojure developers ... consciously stay inside the Clojure community because they love the language and ecosystem" and I think that's pretty interesting – Clojure has like this event horizon where if you cross it, you become so attached to it that you never leave. It's like a little black hole that is already self-sustaining – it can only grow, it will never die, and it can happily wait for opportunity.

We think of hockey stick tech adoption curves as smooth exponentials, but that's not actually true. Hockey sticks demonstrate COMPLIMENT EFFECTS, which is where the latent potential for growth is suddenly activated by an external trigger. An example is broadband/youtube, described by VC Chris Dixon here: http://cdixon.org/2009/09/10/non-linearity-of-technology-ado... Another is smartphones and smartphone apps. Ruby/Rails. Scala/bigdata.

Our goal at http://www.hyperfiddle.net is to use the low-code movement to trigger complement effects in Clojure.

[tombert]

For me, I found Clojure after googling around for various of permutations of "CSP in function language" back in 2016 or so. I fooled around with core.async, thought it was pretty neat, but promptly forgot about it.

About a year later, I was doing a project where I felt a dynamic language would be useful, still wanted it to be pure-functional-ish, and tried Clojure, and this time started with the fundamentals, and once I got to macros, I was completely hooked on Lisp for forever.

I thought it was the coolest thing ever that I could add language features without having to understand compiler theory or anything like that.

=====

Nowadays, my work involves around 50% Java (yuck) and 50% Clojure, but a lot of my personal projects are done with Scheme, since I have to admit that I do kind of like the `define-syntax` macro system better than Clojure's.

I definitely see the "event horizon" analogy. Once you see just how much more productive you are with the language than most others, it's hard to leave.

[StreamBright]

It is becoming Kotlin/Bigdata fairly quickly.

[juskrey]

> As an aside, the 2019 SO survey shows Clojure programmers are the best paid [1].

I am freelancing for Clojure projects for already 6 years and have to say it is true you can expect better compensation in general, but this is only given

1) You are an experienced coder overall, e.g. I am 18 years in dev, and Clojure is seen as a logical high level experience conclusion

2) You can find good existing Clojure project, which is damn hard, and the line of Clojure coders for openings is usually pretty long. And many businesses are expecting to find young coders who can be.. not so well paid. The latter is a very bad approach for Clojure projects (Sorry, young guys, I have seen tons of Clojure code by many people, and it only looks good when the coder is at least 30+)

3) You can find good greenfield tech agnostic project, where your sell point is, again, your overall experience first, Clojure second

But at the end, that all keeps you very fit in many dimensions, and I am not going to give up Clojure, instead investing more

[dominotw]

> Most Clojure programmers I know (myself included) would not choose to go back to Java.

Thats true. I write clojure for living too.

But choice of programming languages in enterprises is not made by programmers.

[tombert]

It is indirectly; if a company has trouble hiring, they might switch up the stack a bit to try and attract new talent.

For example, my previous employer (Jet.com) used F# partly because one of the most senior engineers liked it, but also partly because they thought it might attract some tech talent out of the shadows.

[ken]

I've never heard of any company switching languages because they were having trouble hiring.

[hota_mazi]

> As an aside, the 2019 SO survey shows Clojure programmers are the best paid [1]

That's more an indication of scarcity than anything else. FORTRAN and COBOL programmers are also pretty well compensated.

Also, good luck getting any of these jobs.

[iLemming]

>Also, good luck getting any of these jobs.

When was the last time you've tried? I know a great deal of developers (including myself) working exclusively with Clojure and have never struggled finding a new gig.

[pixelperfect]

I think the Clojure job market is pretty good for senior developers but bad for junior developers. Anecdotal evidence, but I saw someone a few months ago who had an active Clojure blog, gave talks on Clojure, contributed to multiple interesting projects on GitHub, but was unable to find a job before literally running out of money and going homeless. That could just be a weird situation, but I almost never see any job listings looking for junior developers, and when I do, they tend to be in Europe/Canada rather than the U.S.

[WillPostForFood]

Is it growing? It is a difficult metric to quantify, but looking at thing like Github, or Reddit, it seems flat or declining. Clojure initially benefited as the preferred Java escape path, but it seems like that has been supplanted by Kotlin.

https://github.com/oprogramador/github-languages#most-failin...

https://www.benfrederickson.com/ranking-programming-language...

[htfu]

At least the first link has a pretty crazy cutoff though, 2018. Once a lib is mature it can easily go years without updates, doesn't mean development has been abandoned, much less usage.

But trying to compare across languages by package manager traffic or something would obviously be a lot harder.

In any case apparent zero velocity, whatever it's actually tracking, definitely shows that general interest (which constantly seems high) isn't really translating to really wide adoption.

[WillPostForFood]

I agree with your first point, and stability of Clojure the language, and libraries is a strength. But it does suggest fewer people are starting new projects with Clojure, which matches how it feels to me, and matches my experience in the Clojure community, where discussions are a little less active.

[yogthos]

I really don't understand why people obsesses over popularity so much. The only question worth asking is whether the language has a big enough community to be sustainable, especially when dealing with a hosted language that leverages the underlying ecosystem.

In case of Clojure the answer is unequivocally yes. It's got a large active community around it, and there are many companies of all kinds using it in production. Whether it's growing rapidly or slowly doesn't really affect its effectiveness compared to the other options available.

[WillPostForFood]

It has a small active community with many abandoned libraries, no killer app, and painful tooling. I like the language in spite of that, but size of community matters. To your point, as a hosted language you can make up Clojure's deficiencies by using Java libraries, but if you aren't a Java developer (or are a disgruntled Java developer) that isn't a great answer.

The only question worth asking is whether the language has a big enough community to be sustainable

Exactly, and I'd argue Clojure was on a path to yes, but has lost momentum and is leaning toward no.

[cutler]

Not to mention 25000 pure Clojure libraries to add to those inherited from Java.

[iLemming]

Yes, it is growing. Today Clojure hosts more conferences than Rust, Swift, Elm, Erlang, F#, Haskell, Elixir, OCaml, ReasonML and soon the number may exceed number of Scala specific conferences. It will probably never become as popular as Javascript/Typescript or Python and Ruby but it is slowly and steadily growing.

[WillPostForFood]

I'd attribute Clojure conference success to the passionate fans, but look at the google trend line:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

[didibus]

I've noticed the reddit is less active, but I think that's just because everything needing saying was said already. At least it is for me, just busy coding.

The Clojure annual survey gets more and more participants every year, so from that angle it seems to be growing.

[WillPostForFood]

Clojure survey in 2015 had 2,445, 2016 had 2,420 responses, 2018 dropped to 2,325, and 2019 had 2,461. So pretty flat.

[Scarbutt]

As an aside, the 2019 SO survey shows Clojure programmers are the best paid [1].

Not to sound snarky, but that could be interpreted as old clojure projects can't find Clojure programmers.

[iLemming]

No, it's not because of that. The reason I think - F# and Clojure are two main FP languages being used in Finance. Fintech companies are known for paying above average salary. Both F# and Clojure are the most paid languages (according to SO surveys of the last few years)

[agumonkey]

It's not the same though, few years ago, every conf was a ~revelation. That said real professional growth is actually even better.

[iLemming]

"Fall" of Clojure? Clojure is still growing and not showing any signs of stopping anytime soon. Conferences popping up all around the world. Almost every European country has its own Clojure conference, some have multiple.

Clojure today has more conferences, meetups, podcasts, jobs and books than any of those "non-mainstream" PLs like OCaml/ReasonML, Haskell, Elm, Elixir, Erlang, Julia, F#, Swift. Soon number of Clojure conferences will exceed number of Scala-related confs.

Clojure community is still innovating. Mind that the steward company has probably less than 100 engineers in total and the community has less active members than the number of engineers working for Google, yet they are constantly doing pretty cool things. They are figuring out interop with Python and R from Clojure, they are constantly improving Clojurescript performance, they're experimenting with type systems, improving Editor/IDE support, doing machine learning stuff, serverless, graphql, smart-contracts, distributed systems, etc. etc.

People don't see it, because they are too busy shoveling shit from one corner of the ecosystem to another in Python, Typescript, Java, Ruby, Golang etc. stacks. But Clojurists are quietly building things and solving real problems.

[StreamBright]

What are you talking about? The long term Clojure users are probably still using Clojure, based on the activity observed on Github repos. I think Java people who do not like Clojure much more inclined to use Scala and more recently Kotlin.

[ballpark]

Oh wow... not a chance

[WillPostForFood]

I don't think people are going back to Java, but there are other options. I prefer Clojure, but Kotlin is a much easier switch for most Java devs.

[Scarbutt]

Looks like everyone just went back to java.

From my surroundings more to JS/TS/Python/Kotlin, obviously big communities have a network effect for pragmatic reasons.

[paxdoxemus]

Was going back to JavaScript your choice or an external factor such as job-related reasons?

As someone starting out with Clojure and ClojureScript I'd be interested to hear about your experience.

[TickMark]

External factors. Clojure didn't offer a great variety of jobs, especially remote. There was a decent number of jobs for onsite positions, but that's the trade I wasn't willing to make.

The language itself is great. The ecosystem is fine, you can find most libraries and if you can't you can at time use the JAVA versions. This was at times a pain because Java client libraries for certain services were out of date.

Solving real-life business problems was tricky but ultimately fun and satisfying. As the resulting code is usually very elegant and succinct.

I really loved the interactive programming aspect of it. It was really easy to go from a repl experiment to the actual implementation.

[forgotmylastacc]

I work here: https://pitch.com/about#hiring

We are looking for ClojureScript/Clojure developers. And we support remote working.

[TickMark]

This would be great, if I weren't starting a new contract on Monday. :)

I mean this is still great for someone else. I am not surprised you are Berlin-based, I was at EuroClojure in 2017 in Berlin and was pleasantly surprised by how many Clojure companies existed there, most didn't offer remote work though.

[loevborg]

Another Pitcher here. We're betting big on Clojure(Script) and are hiring! If you're curious, feel free to reach out (my email address is in my profile).

[fnordsensei]

I'm mystified that not more people are offering remote possibilities when hiring for Clojure. There are some really great people out there, but the likelihood that they live in your neighborhood is low.

Geography seems like an arbitrary constraint to me. Nothing about it increases the probability of getting a better candidate.

[iLemming]

I beg to differ - Clojure is like specifically made for distributed teams. I have never had such nice experience in other tech stacks when working remotely. There are many more remote Clojure jobs today than non-remote.

[insulanus]

You are agreeing with fnordsensei. :)

[iLemming]

>Clojure didn't offer a great variety of jobs, especially remote

Things have changed. Today there are more Clojure jobs than of Haskell, OCaml, F#, Elixir, Elm. Especially remote jobs. There are few channels in Clojurians Slack where people post jobs and resumes and discuss them. There's a new posting almost every day.